Proving Money Doesn't Buy Happiness in Great Neck, NY

The comic Chris Rock nailed it with his observation that men are only as faithful as their options. Big, fat, poor, ugly guys with no money who puff their chests out and pronounce things like “I would never cheat on my wife,” are admirable only until you realize that of course they wouldn’t – because no one is interested in sleeping with them to begin with.

But when you’re wealthy and well-kept, you’ve got tons of options.

I live on Long Island in Nassau County, which is a checkerboard of obscenely affluent neighborhoods and run-in-the-mill suburban nowherevilles. But the absolute pinnacle of privilege and wealth on LI is Great Neck, a town on the North Shore, bordering Queens and offering both 20 minute commutes into Manhattan along with views of the Long Island Sound. They’ve got great schools (everyone knows someone who went to North or South), a killer diner (Bruce’s, baby) and some pretty drop-dead gorgeous homes, particularly in the Kings Point section (the model for Fitzgerald’s “West Egg” setting in The Great Gatsby).

And yet – YET – despite all of this luxury and abundance and comfort and affluence, a whopping 3% of the town’s residents are paying members of the adult cheating site Ashley Madison…

From the New York Post:

Ritzy Great Neck, LI, is crawling with more cheating spouses than any other town or neighborhood in the greater New York City metro area, according to a survey by a dating Web site that promotes infidelity.

“There seems to be a disproportionate amount of cheating spouses in affluent areas and neighborhoods in New York,” said Noel Biderman, the CEO of AshleyMadison.com, a dating site for people looking for extramarital sex, which crunched the numbers.

To calculate the rankings, Ashley Madison officials compared government census data to the area codes of their members and calculated a percentage. In the case of Great Neck, they found that at least 3.02 percent of the town’s adult residents are paid members of the dating site.